From Abuse and Addiction to Writing and Celebrity
J.T. LeRoy was born to a 14-year-old drug addicted prostitute who worked truck stops. He was so beautiful and delicate that he resembled a girl, which is how he started turning tricks as a child alongside his mother. Heroin addiction soon followed, but somehow LeRoy took a detour from the highway to self-destruction. Clean and sober at 24, LeRoy is now a literary celebrity with a bright future. With his third book, Harold's End about to hit the shelves, he is named by celebreties as their favorite writer, and "has been embraced by established writers including Tobias Wolff, Michael Chabon and Mary Gaitskill, and by a cadre of celebrities with, as it happens, their own troubled pasts: Courtney Love, Winona Rider, Tatum O'Neal and Billy Corgan," reports the Eugene Register-Guard. LeRoy, whose fiction is based on his childhood experiences, is in no danger of becoming a flavor of the month. "The thing about attention is it's like drinking. One drink is too many, and a million isn't enough,'' he says. Meanwhile, the film adaptation of LeRoy's second book, The Heart is Deceitful Above all Things, starring Peter Fonda, Wynona Ryder and Marilyn Manson, is making the rounds at various international film festivals, reports Filmstew.com